As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Conventional modular blade server chassis systems are a type of scalable information handling system that incorporate compute, network and storage infrastructure components within a physical chassis form factor. Each such server platform has unique characteristics in terms of how the compute, networking and storage resources are connected and provisioned. One example of such a conventional modular server chassis is a Dell Power Edge M1000e modular blade server chassis available from Dell Products L.P. of Round Rock, Tex. Such a modular chassis platform can include different height blades (full-height, half-height and quarter-height blades), multiple redundant network I/O fabrics (A, B, and C fabrics that may be for example, Gigabit Ethernet “GE”, Fibre Channel “FC” or InfiniBand “IB”) and Dell EqualLogic blade storage arrays. The Dell M1000e chassis also includes one or more Chassis Management Controllers (CMCs) that provide administrator access for tasks such as inventory, configuration, remote power-up, monitoring, alerts, and to perform management of chassis operations such as security, power, and cooling. In some cases, a server chassis platform also can include direct attached storage (DAS) storage, and the CMC enables the ability to create virtual disks that can be assigned to one or more compute blades of the system.
In the past, templates have been employed by external provisioning tools to provision modular blade server chassis. Such an external tool is remotely deployed and executed on hardware that is remote from a modular blade server chassis system which it is provisioning. It is configured at a user console, and uses multiple remote protocols, e.g., web services management “WS-MAN” to a remote access controller known as iDRAC, telnet/secure shell “SSH” to network switches, proprietary storage application programming interfaces to EqualLogic PS-M4110 storage blades or WS-MAN/racadm command line interface to a chassis management controller (CMC).
An administrator attempting to provision the infrastructure of a conventional scalable chassis platform using a conventional external provisioning tool must potentially navigate through multiple user interfaces (UIs) or command line interfaces (CLIs) in order to provision the infrastructure to meet an information technology (IT) service requirement. The administrator must also provision the compute infrastructure (e.g., BIOS, boot sequence, internal RAID drives, converged network adapters “CNAs”), configure the Internet Small Computer System Interface “iSCSI” storage (e.g., size, thin/thick provisioning) or DAS storage (e.g., size, RAID level), and make assignments to compute and configure the network fabric parameters (stacking, link aggregation groups “LAGs”, virtual local area networks “VLANs”). This provisioning process can also differ depending on the particular platform, firmware revision and incremental platform revision of a given system. The conventional external tool must also keep pace with different platform generations (as well as changes within a given platform generation) with different capabilities that causes churn in terms of solution delivery and maintainability. This requires the use of external up-stream tools/processes (e.g., management consoles/CLIs) that need to change every time a new platform or platform update is released.